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Google has released four new Addons for Gmail in Gmail Labs today. The experiments bring previews from Picasa, YouTube, Flickr and Yelp into mails.

To mail a link to Picasa, YouTube, Flickr or Yelp is included below are small preview images. As the Gmail blog post is, it works similarly to the identification and linking of addresses, calendar data and packet numbers.

Google built some new Gmail Labs features that do just that. For our first set, we picked stuff that often shows up in email: YouTube videos, Picasa and Flickr links, and Yelp reviews. Turn on Picasa previews from the Labs tab under Settings, and rather than having to click on a Picasa album link to see the photos it contains, you can see photos right in the message itself:

Same for Flickr:

Enable Youtube previews, and you can watch YouTube videos from inside your email:

And whenever you receive a Yelp link in an email, Yelp previews show you ratings, phone numbers, and other listing information right there:

Give them a try and send Google your thoughts. If you work on a product that would lend itself to a great preview in Gmail, Google would love to hear from you too.

Now, in conjunction with Google Calendar, you can see all of your orkut friend’s birthdays for the whole year. If you’ve already used Google Calendar before, you will shortly see a link (right below the “upcoming birthdays” section) where you can add your orkut friends’ birthdays to your Google calendar.

Once you’ve added your orkut birthday calendar to Google Calendar, you can navigate forward and backwards through time to see whose birthday is coming up and any birthdays you might have missed. If you don’t see the promotional link, use this URL to subscribe to the calendar, announces orkut Blog.

For more information, visit orkut Blog Here..

Google has fixed an annoying feature that used to mark entire Gmail’s threaded conversations as “unread,” after you cliked “mark as unread” button. When you open next time, you’ve to remember which messages you already read and which ones you didn’t.

Now if you’re reading a conversation that had unread messages when you opened it and you mark it unread, Gmail will only mark those messages that were unread when you opened the conversation in the first place.

The EPIC (The Electronic Privacy Information Center) has a complaint filed against Google asking the FTC (U.S. Competition Authority Federal Trade Commission) about the Civil rights organization Electronic Privacy Information Center, the complaint here published.

Here is a summary of the complaint that is filed:

This complaint concerns privacy and security risks associated with the provision of “Cloud Computing Services” by Google, Inc. to American consumers, businesses, and federal agencies of the United States government. Recent reports indicate that Google does not adequately safeguard the confidential information that it obtains. Given the previous opinions of the Federal Trade Commission regarding the obligation of service providers to ensure security, EPIC hereby petitions the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google’s Cloud Computing Services, to determine the adequacy of the privacy and security safeguards, to assess the representations made by the firm regarding these services, to determine whether the firm has engaged in unfair and/or deceptive trade practices, and to take any such measures as are necessary, including to enjoin Google from offering such services until safeguards are verifiably established. Such action by the Commission is necessary to ensure the safety and security of information submitted to Google by American consumers, American businesses, and American federal agencies. And the complaint is published. here …..

EPIC also asks the FTC to check the security services in the Google Docs, Gmail, Picasa or Google Calendar to be verify again. Furthermore, Google has improved the security than when it initially set up the services.

[Sources]

Google itself gave to this statement:

“We have a copy of this complaint, but we have not yet viewed the details. Many providers of cloud computing services, including Google, have taken extensive measures, procedures and technologies developed to the highest level of data protection. In fact, the Save in the “Cloud” even safer than on the disk. We are very aware that our users have their data are very important and take this responsibility very seriously.